The Theatre of the Absurd that is the modern Republican Party would be amusing save for the fact that this group of mentally handicapped individuals are not only running around with sharp scissors and other things dangerous to themselves and others, but have access to untold amounts of money to get themselves elected to positions of power, where their capacity to do others harm is immense. Among the many buffoons in the GOP’s Presidential Clown Car, surely the most deranged—and therefore potentially the most dangerous—is Dr. Ben Carson.

By now, most sane people who have been at all following the current political cycle are aware that Dr. Ben is not all there, to put it nicely. That he was, prior to making his derangement the subject of public scrutiny by running for the White House, an eminent brain surgeon, makes diagnosing his mental illness all the more difficult. One neurologist, has argued that Dr. Ben is indeed dumb; egomania is common among doctors and that as a brain surgeon his pronouncements have never seriously been questioned until now may account for some of his shock that his many inconsistencies, prevarications and just plain kookoo ideas have been criticized by those media still not shills for the billionaire class (and make no mistake their number grows smaller by the day).

However, whether Ben Carson is an idiot savant or not, there is one thing that is clear to this observer: Doctor Ben is a pathological liar. Now, this is not just an insult or political slur: most politicians lie through their eye teeth on a regular basis: the entire Republican Party has been consciously and consistently lying for the last six years. But even the most black-hearted GOP operative knows in their heart of hearts that what they say is pure turd, designed to con the Great Unwashed to vote against their own self interest. Most of you who read this may not remember it, but Richard Nixon got elected because he had “a secret plan to end the Vietnam War.” It was so secret that to this day nobody knows what it was. Of course, Trickle Down Economics is the biggest lie of them all and even though we have forty-five years of it not working, the Republicans are still trotting that one out to justify impoverishing the middle class so that the 1% can steal even more of their already diminishing wealth. No, Ben Carson is of a different ilk entirely: Ben Carson actually believes, not only the standard Republican propaganda, but he believes his own lies about himself. That is why it is pathological.

I went to college with a liar such as Doctor Ben and so I am familiar with the pathology firsthand. My classmate—who shall remain nameless—would blurt out absurd lies so patently false that after the first few honkers, no one on campus believed him. The more charitable of us would just sigh and shake our heads; most just dismissed him as a bullshit artist not worthy of our contempt. A few, such as this author, appreciated the sheer absurdity of his pathology and were amused by his bald faced lying: that his ancestor founded Yale University, for example, and that, had he so chosen, could have attended it for free. Sound familiar? “General Westmoreland himself offered me a four year scholarship to West Point, but I decided to go into Medicine,” is eerily familiar. There were many other lies, equally deluded, although I don’t think my classmate ever claimed to have tried to knife a friend or hit his mother with a hammer. Clearly my classmate never aspired to the world class prevarication that Ben Carson does.

What is frightening, truly frightening, is that Doctor Ben is soaring in the GOP political polls and that his followers keep swallowing his lying as gospel truth. Of course, he is a “Good Christian” so he would never deceive them, would he? I have learned over the years that whenever someone proclaims themselves a “Good Christian” to hide the silverware, lock up my daughter in her room and put a anti-theft bar on the steering wheel of my car. Sadly, however, a large part of the American electorate, despite having been lied to repeatedly, still have not learned their lessons.

The Party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt while rolling in corporate money has sold its soul and is SICK!

Ben Carson may or may not be as dumb as he sounds, but his delusional mind clearly appeals to far too many of voters. I fear that Doctor Ben, or one of the other members of the GOP Clown Car, will con a majority of the public yet again. We almost didn’t survive the Republican engineered Crash of ’08; America and the rest of the world can survive another Oh-Oh! decade of Republican lies and deceit. It could be argued that we no longer live in a Democracy but an Oligarchy; I would argue, rather, that we live in an Idiocracy, where a concatenation knaves, scoundrels, cretins and liars have a working majority, not only of most state legislatures but of Congress as well. I hope events prove me wrong, but as comedian Ron White has observed, “you can’t fix stupid.”

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About Christopher Kiernan Coleman

I am a freelance author, historian and observor of events past, present and future. I received my bachelors degree at St. Anselm College and pursued my graduate work at the University of Chicago. I currently has six books in print, including one about Abraham Lincoln. My latest book in print is Ambrose Bierce and the Period of Honorable Strife, published by University of Tennessee Press. I have also published numerous articles in the popular press as well as scholarly journals.
I have additional book projects in progress, including one which looks at the origins of mechanized warfare and the roots of modern Islamic fundamentalist politics, as well as several projects dealing with Dark Age and Arthurian history and archaeology.